The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Informatica® develops the PowerCenter® suite of products. Informatica® Corporation's best practice is to split out environments by purpose and/or by business line. Accordingly, many Informatica® deployments have more than one environment to administrator. Larger deployments may have upwards of thirty-five unique environments to administrator with hundreds of applications and users.
Administration is a manual process which requires accessing numerous workstation applications and a web portal to configure and deploy environments. It may also be required to access a Linux®, UNIX® and/or or other operating system server to configure as many as twenty-one file systems or more, as well as configure security settings for each application environment. Furthermore, administrators manually accessed each environment/server and performed manual data entry or run commands/scripts in each unique environment/server.
These manual tasks are very time consuming and required accessing each unique environment/server. As with most manual processes there is a high rate of error due to the amount of settings required to appropriately configure and secure an application. Furthermore, data collection for auditing of environments was adhoc and inefficient. As the use of this product expands, a more efficient way of managing the environments used in an Informatica® PowerCenter® deployment is required.